JUNOS Enterprise Routing

Why Enterprise Routing?

Many books have been written about JUNOS, but this book is unique in that it will prepare you to use JUNOS in an enterprise-centric sense. Enterprise is a term that equipment manufacturers and others use to distinguish the internal networks of “normal” businesses from the typically larger ones run by service providers, phone companies, and other network providers. Although there are, of course, similarities, every type of business requires its own unique set of capabilities from its network infrastructure regardless of its size: financial institutions have different needs from those of retail chains, which themselves differ from governments and universities.

Enterprise business networks are not simply small service provider networks. Although some aspects of networking technology—such as faster interfaces and greater degrees of reliability—continue to be attributes of both environments, their design goals and operational techniques differ greatly. A service provider usually maintains a network for the benefit of paying customers who produce revenue, whereas the network of an enterprise such as a bank has traditionally been viewed as an investment whose operational expense should be minimized. This essential difference has meant that service providers have usually been seen as the custodians of network innovation, with enterprises reluctant to invest more than the bare minimum in their infrastructure because of the uncertainty of real return on their investment.

There are signs that this attitude is changing. Companies in virtually every industry have embraced the idea that more effective use of their IT infrastructure can make them more competitive and efficient. To that end, enterprise executives are increasingly interested in innovative ways to capitalize on their investments in data networks. This trend is most pronounced in data-intensive industries such as banking, finance, and insurance, but it extends into even less obvious areas such as manufacturing and transportation.

Service provider and enterprise networks continue to be different in terms of their customer base and their relationship to technology, but networking in general is becoming increasingly important to the competitiveness of all types of companies. Some of the most outstanding examples of the ways that networking can improve business fundamentals are those related to developments in IP routing, and many of those developments have recently come from Juniper Networks.